“Glasgow, Saturday Night” by John Atkinson Grimshaw, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Iran war Iran breaks off negotiations with the US and vows to “c...
Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one . But what are they good for?
You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC , Raspberry Pi Connect , or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great, and so is SSH if you don't need a full desktop.
Since the PiKVM came out in 201...
Hello,
Nice to see you all again so soon.
Mixed rockets Genhis
Imagine you are setting up your first space platform. You start building tiles, a full rocket-load is sent.
When you need belts, assembling machines or furnaces, again, a full stack is sent.
A small platform could request 10-20 automated rockets and leave plenty of unused items in the inventory.
The advantage is that you don't have to wait for more when you decide to rebuild it or add machines.
This is how we ...
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Barry Hess, whose blog can be found at bjhess.com .
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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
I’m a programmer-type from rural Minnesota. I grew...
The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the
movie screen, it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t
compete with the computer screen. — Philip Roth
We’re halfway through 2026, and according to Goodreads I’ve read 80 books
so far, fiction and non-fiction and textbooks, including such doorstoppers as
Life and Fate (864p, astoundingly good). And I don’t feel like I’m
trying particularly hard. I still have plenty of tim...
Do web components make your design system framework-agnostic?
adamsilver.io
I recently read a blog post claiming that web components can make your design system framework agnostic.
But this is down to the false dichotomy between engineers who:
love React (or the current popular thing)
hate React (or the current popular thing)
React is probably a bad choice for your design system. But that’s not an argument against libraries or frameworks.
That’s an argument for choosing something better than React.
Either way, the claim that web components give you a...
The Apple Watch is one of the most fascinating pieces of modern technology for me. A gorgeous screen, an abundance of sensors, and a bonkers amount of computational power in a tiny little package that fits on your wrist. It reminds me of the Vision Pro in that a good amount of the time I put it on I can’t help but smile at how far technology has come.
But it’s also weirdly something I’ve never used a great deal. Every few generations I buy a new one and try it out for a few weeks, but I ...
I can afford breakfast now! I can afford breakfast now!
I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been looking for. I've released it as an alpha package called micropython-wasm , and I'm using it for a code execution sandbox plugin for Datasette Agent called datasette-agent-micropython .
Why do I want a sandbox?
What I want from a sandbox
WebAssembly looks really promising here
MicroP...
Sometimes Sydney Trains runs a special train, just for me! Or at least, I pretend they do. How luxurious.
As an aside, for those of you who live in cities with double deck train carriages, do you sit upstairs or down? I tend to sit downstairs, because the rocking motion of taller carriages is reduced slightly… though I admit the upper deck is more fun when I know I’ll be crossing the Harbour Bridge.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-05. Sometimes Sydney Trains runs a special trai...
This post is a little side-quest from my “Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption” series. My “Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption” series ( part 1 , part 2 ) has been laser focused on how different configurations and behaviors affect parallel consumption in share groups (Queues for Kafka). So far I’ve shown that you most definitely can hold share groups wrong . You could quite easily and inadvertently create a work queue and with the right combination of things...
A single server processes two job classes:
High-priority jobs (class H) arrive frequently and are served quickly.
Low-priority jobs (class L) arrive rarely and take longer to serve.
The server always picks the highest-priority job available. Total server utilization $\rho = \rho_H + \rho_L < 1$, so the server has spare capacity on average. Yet low-priority jobs can wait far longer than the utilization level suggests they should.
Static Priority: Starvation at Moderate Load
With a s...
Programmers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Back when we had real programmers. Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves. Hackers were hackers in those days before money took over the industry.
Don’t even get me started on LLMs. Could there be a better example of today’s degenerate spirit? A machine to mass-produce software (not good software, just barely good ...
Compilers, especially method just-in-time compilers, operate on one function at
a time. It is a natural code unit size, especially for a dynamic language JIT:
at a given point in time, what more information can you gather about other
parts of a running, changing system?
I don’t have any data to back this up—maybe I should go gather some—but on
average, methods are small. Especially in languages such as Ruby that use
method dispatch for everything, even instance variable (attribute, fiel...
Greece expands Shield AI V-BAT fleet for maritime operations
shield.ai
ATHENS (June 2, 2026) – Shield AI today announced that the Hellenic Army has signed a procurement agreement to grow its fleet of V-BAT vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) in support of Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) operations across the Aegean Sea.
The Hellenic Army currently uses the V-BAT to deliver intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The acquisition of more platforms will increase Greece’s ability to maintain persistent mari...
Sunday came, Sunday went, but the notes can be week notes any day they want to be.
Current situation:
A LIE. This photo is from Sunday when I started these and then did not finish them. It’s Monday now and I’m in bed with rice water toner pads all over my face. I will not be sharing a photo at this time thank you for understanding. I do feel very moisturized.
Monday 25 May: Memorial Day, also hospital day. Having to work certain holidays is a new th...
I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms…
Source I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary ...
“No way,” I exclaim with wonder and glee and surprise. I look up and stare for a few moments, transfixed by the delicate wisps of cloud that rest side by side. The wisps move in tandem, as if woven together by an invisible bond. A pink hue is cast onto the periphery of a nearby cloud, a cloud whose colour ranges from grey to a Heavenly white. “The cloud looks like the angled trunk of an elephant or a cat’s paw,” my inner child observes, seeing the cloud from a new perspective. What sha...
It's Just Broken: Oh WordPress by Pup On Tech In a recent post, the Pup ON Tech perfectly captures the absolute nightmare that is building a self-hosted WordPress site. What starts as a simple VPS setup quickly devolves into a bloated mess of heavy themes, dozens of conflicting plugins, and rigid page builders. By the time you’ve fought with broken caching layers and terrible performance, you realise that fixing the bloat defeats the entire purpose of using WordPress. Read post ➡ WordPress...
IPv6 is weird. One of the more strange parts of the standard is that every interface's link local addresses are in fe80::whatever . If you have a machine with two network interfaces, both of them will be in fe80:: , so if you have a packet destined to fe80::4 , how do you disambiguate it?
The answer is you use IPv6 scopes/zones . The exact format of what goes into a zone is OS dependent, but on Linux it's the interface name and on Windows it's the interface ID. This lets the kernel...
“I will not say "Do not weep", for not all tears are an evil.”
― The Lord of the Rings
On my way to the last stop in New Zealand, I spent a good amount of time at the Ōhau Point Lookout , which is known for a nearby fur seal colony.
At one point, another photographer pointed out dolphins in the ocean. While they were quite far away, it was interesting to see their acrobatic talents in action.
My trip ended in Kaikōura , with a rocky beach right next to my hostel.
...
Yesterday, National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt delivered her last annual State of the Sciences Address . Overall the talk basically calls us to adapt to the new reality that industrial and foundation support for research has taken a far larger role in academic research. I fear we may be losing the broad academic independence and exploration that has made our universities the envy of the world. Government funding for research has become more challenging to receive, more bureauc...
Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs.
Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way;
He lists lots of common metrics, and why they are flawed. Sadly he doesn’t give any suggestions on what would be better. In my view, since we cannot measure productivity ,...
